I'm Katie Lyon and I'm a 5th grade teacher, VP and blogger at Mrs. Lyon - Teaching: The Art of Possibility. On my blog, I share classroom tips, teaching ideas, and classroom resources. I'm a big fan of technology, and am in charge of our school's 1:1 iPad program. I share tech tips that can be applied to the classroom.

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Tuesday, April 12, 2011

I recently came across this website called My Fake Wall and am in love. While this site promotes the ability for people to create fake profile pages "just for fun", I see it as a way to have my students research people and present their research in a whole new format!

What's cool about it?

1. Students can create a profile - picture and all for the person they are researching.
2. Fake "status updates" can be made. Just imagine your class doing this for people of the American Revolution. I can already see a status update for Paul Revere saying "The Redcoats are coming - must warn the others!"
3. Fake friends can be added to the profile, so students can create an accurate friend list of whomever they are researching. Even better - these "friends" can comment on the status updates or post a message of their own on the page.

These are just a few great things about this tool that I have seen. In addition, I'm glad I can create just one generic login for my class and have multiple students sign-in under my login and create different pages. I can't wait to use this resource with my kids.......now I just need to think of who I'm going to have them research and create. Truly the possibilities are endless. You could have kids do famous scientists, mathematicians, past presidents, etc.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Teachers around the world will agree with me that grading papers is one of the most time consuming components of our job. Enter Flubaroo - a new script that coincides with GoogleDocs that makes grading quizzes and tests a snap. This great tool was introduced to me by our Technology Genius at our school. However, the day he sent the email to a bunch of us about it was on April Fool's Day. As you can imagine, I thought it was a big joke. Either his idea of one or since it involved Google, I thought it was their joke of the year. WRONG - it's real folks! So, stop sitting here and reading my blog and go to Flubaroo and play around with it. You'll be thankful you did!